109. Hunting Al-Qaeda: The CIA’s Deadliest Day (Ep 4)

17:23Gordon:And he looks away and the image goes dark.

17:27David:So that pretty dark moment, let's take a break. And when we come back afterwards. We'll see how the final moments of this tragedy unfold.

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20:52David:well welcome back it's mid-afternoon on the 30th of december 2009 Balawi is heading for the border and for the border crossing at Ghulam Khan to take him from North Waziristan in Pakistan and into Afghanistan towards coast.

21:13Gordon:Yeah. And I mean, Balawi is a mess at this point. His legs injured, he's wearing 30 pounds of metal and explosives fastened to his chest. He's got to be wondering, you know, as he said beforehand, if all of this is just going to be for nothing. And, you know, he's sitting on the Pakistani side of the border. He sees his driver, the driver that had been sent from Coast Base waiting for him. Driver's in a white sedan. He gets in. They're waved through and on their way to Coast. At one point, they switch cars. They meet up with a red Subaru hatchback, get into that. Balaoui is 26 hours late.

21:51David:Because he's doing the videos, which is just That's going to raise the tension, isn't it, at the base?

21:55Gordon:Yeah, exactly. Now, the car had been out of cell phone range for a while, but as they approached the city, Balaoui takes the phone from the driver and calls Ali bin Zaid using a phone number that he'd written down on a scrap of paper. Salaam alaikum, Ali bin Zaid says, peace be with you. Balaoui apologizes for the delay and again repeats his concerns about being searched by Afghan guards who might be spies.

22:21David:So he's basically saying, I'm really worried about being searched by Afghan guards who might then reveal to the Taliban, to Al-Qaeda, that I'm meeting with you and that might need to be being killed. So it's a smart card to play, isn't it? To say, don't let any Afghan guards search me. I just need to go straight to the CIA people or to you specifically, Bin Zaid, he's thinking.

22:46Gordon:And what that, of course, is doing is it's sending a really important message into the CI base at Coase, which is basically saying your desire for security is running directly in contradiction to your desire for a productive asset meeting with the top source that the agency is working right now. It's obviously a very devious, devilishly clever thing to be putting into injecting into CIA at that moment in time. So Ali Ben Zaid says, okay, yes, you don't want to, you like a friend. Now the car slows down as it approaches the main gate at Coast Base. And it passes through these kind of high walls, HESCO barriers, things like that, that narrow down as you drive in.

23:39Gordon:So it brings the traffic into one lane, right? And trained on that lane is a 50 caliber machine gun. And the car passes through the main gate and Balaoui is not searched. this is one of the things that you know even now 16 years later continues I think to mystify a lot of the people who are involved in this and it's really hard to talk about because I think the decision to not search him was made by people who were dead yeah

24:24David:Yeah.

24:25Gordon:And what else can you say?

24:27David:I mean, it's just worth spelling out, isn't it? If he had been searched, they'd have spotted it. He'd have detonated at that point and killed the guards who were searching him, but it doesn't happen. And so it passes that first checkpoint and it's now into the base, isn't it?

24:42Gordon:Yeah. And I think, we don't know. I think it's possible that this was a very last minute decision.

24:50David:Yeah.

24:51Gordon:Maybe because of that message. maybe because of that message what i do know from from speaking with some people um who were there that day was that you know ali bin zaid who's having the communication with him um is is extremely giddy and excited about this meeting because this is you know this is like the big break in the case you can just see how these done you know the guy calls on his way in and says i'm terrified of af Taliban spies among the guards are being searched. And you can see the sort of train wreck coming. So it goes through the gate. The car turns left, kind of barely slowing down as it zigzags around HESCO barriers.

25:33Gordon:To the right of the car are more just kind of high walls topped with barbed wire. And there's an opening in one of those walls. And the Subaru is steered through a second checkpoint, which is open. On the opposite side of the compound is a building with a metal roof and this kind of wide awning. And this is where there's a large gathering of people that are outside waiting, right? Part of this group that are going to have the meeting with Balaoui. Now, I'll also say that over in Amman Station where this case started, it seems like what's going on is obviously being watched with extreme anticipation.

26:17Gordon:And everyone's on their instant messaging program because everyone in Coast Base is yellow on this instant messaging thing, which means they're away from their computers. Now, behind the Subaru that's pulled in, the inner gate of the compound is pulled shut. Balaoui is in the passenger seat sitting behind the driver. The driver stops the car in the middle of this gravel lot that's in front of the building. And Ali Benzadeh is there. He's wearing a camo hat. He's standing next to a guy in jeans and a baseball cap. Car door opens and Balaoui's face to face with one of the CIA security officers. Because now the plan is to search him, right?

27:02David:And he acts very suspiciously at that moment, because he realizes it, doesn't he? He just kind of backs away, you know, and shimmies across the backseat.

27:10Gordon:And this is where you're there, you're thinking something's weird.

27:15David:Yeah, because he's moving across the car away from the security officer to the other side of the car. Yeah.

27:22Gordon:And, you know, he gets out on the opposite side. Obviously, a lot of the Americans now are shouting at him, right, and trying to get control of the situation. But he stands up quite painfully, I'm sure, because he's leading on his crutch for support, starts to hobble forward and his hand searching for the detonator. Now, the way that these suicide vests are constructed, you have to unzip a pocket to get to the detonator. And obviously, the person who's doing this is extremely nervous. Yeah. You don't want to accidentally set it off, basically. Accidentally set it off or do it too early when you're not close to the target.

27:59Gordon:So the idea is you have to unzip so that you get closer to the intended target. So he unzips. He's kind of hobbling forward, his hand searching for the detonator. Now everyone is realizing that something's gone terribly wrong. The CIA group is shouting. Belaoui's path is blocked. He's surrounded by men with guns who are trying to get control of the situation. Belaoui's finger is on the detonator. He can see Ali Benzade. Belaoui's shoulder is grabbed, probably by one of the security guys. Blawi shuts his eyes. And then with his finger on that, it's just a twitch, just a twitch. It explodes with sufficient force to snap steel.

28:39Gordon:And the heat of that explosion is going to climb to well over 4 ,000 degrees. The blast wave is going to go out at about 15 ,000 feet per second. It's powerful enough to lift the car off the ground and to actually collapse internal organs of the people who are right there. The three security guys who are nearest to Balaoui are basically just sent hurtling backward. One is thrown against a truck that's more than 30 feet away. And the sound of that initial explosion is followed by this barrage of metal, the shrapnel that had been built around the explosive just tears outward and starts to rip through everything in sight.

29:26Gordon:Now, the driver of the car, the three security guys, Darren Labonte, the case officer, Ali Benzade, the Jordanian case officer, they're killed, probably killed instantly by the blast because they're so close. Now, there's 11 others that are on kind of the far side of the car. and they're cut down by the shrapnel. And to give a sense of the power of it, I mean, shrapnel is sunk into the compound's main metal gate, which is like 200 feet away. CIA officers who went to coast in the years to follow talked about seeing holes in metal I-beams on the base compound that had been made by the ball bearings that flew out from the suicide vest.

30:16Gordon:So the whole place is just scarred. Pretty much everybody is hit, but the shrapnel damage is random. Jennifer Matthews was hit, devastatingly so, while one of the officers standing by her was kind of only mildly injured. And we say mildly injured, I mean, awful injuries, but survived. There was a targeter on the base who managed to kind of stagger to her feet and then run off between two buildings before collapsing to the ground. And, you know, the piece of shrapnel, like smaller than a marble, had been the only thing that hit her and it had pierced the veins and arteries leading into her heart.

30:52Gordon:And she died. Balaoui's head bounced against the side of a building and came to rest in that gravel lot. And of course, medics come running and the CIA medic who gets there on site basically says, look, without immediate surgery, five of these people are going to die within minutes, including Jennifer Matthews. There is a Russian-built MI-17 helicopter, which is property of the Afghan army, and it's on the compound. It's pressed into service and basically begins taking the wounded to Camp Salerno, which is a few miles north of Coast City proper, and there's a more extensive battlefield hospital there.

31:34Gordon:Now, Jennifer Matthews stops breathing on the short chopper flight. The shrapnel had apparently torn away a chunk of her neck. One of her legs had been nearly stripped of skin and muscle. And her heart is basically motionless. And all the while, those same time screens in Amman, they're all yellow still. And the team there knows that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. Frantic surgeries continue for hours. The people who are stabilized get placed on helicopters to go to Bagram, you know, airbase in Kabul, where other doctors and other medical teams will take over. But seven CIA officers are dead.

32:18Gordon:Ali bin Zayed, the Jordanian case officer, is dead. So is the Afghan driver. and six more CI officers are grievously wounded in what is the deadliest day for the agency during the war on terror.

32:34David:I mean, it's awful to hear about it now. I mean, I can remember that it took a few days for it to emerge what had happened. The rumors started to filter out that there'd been some kind of explosion at an American base in Afghanistan. And that's what I remember hearing first. Those rumours started pretty quickly. But then within a few days, it became clear it was a CIA base. And then it became clear how awful it was and how serious it was and how many had died. then actually quite quickly and partly because of those videos which are going to come out from the al-qaeda taliban side the story that it was a kind of double triple agent whatever you call him who tricked the cia quite quickly will come out i mean i had one awful memory actually of being asked to go on to the bbc and talk about it and at that point uh i knew jennifer had been killed who I'd known.

33:32David:And I should have said, no, I won't go on and talk about it. But I just thought, this is my job to go on and talk about these things. I'm a security correspondent. And also, if I have to say, well, I knew her, so I'm finding it a bit difficult, then that would also raise all kind of questions. So I just thought, okay, I'll go do it. And I remember going on a BBC channel to talk about it. And the question from the presenter was something like, isn't this a kind of an amazing story about double agents and deception? And I remember feeling almost physically sick as I came off, you know, having to answer it because of thinking it is an amazing story, but I actually knew one of the people who died and I found it intensely, you know, kind of difficult to talk about it because I felt I had to, and I had to kind of, you know, talk about it.

34:14David:But I, I then came off and actually felt awful actually having to talk about someone who died. And, and you realize how often actually as a journalist, you talk about things which are extraordinary stories and, you know, and it is an extraordinary story in some ways, but that But actually, most of the time, you don't know someone who died in it. And therefore, it's a reminder that actually real people are dying in these stories. And you're talking about the death of people and people who other people will know. And it was quite a powerful reminder about the burden of talking about these things in which people are dying.

34:48David:And I guess also, you know, devastating for the CIA to have suffered something like that. Fueled a desire, I guess, also to take revenge again, wasn't it? Immediately after that, you get a wave of drone strikes, don't you, from the CIA to go after those behind it, which I guess is that visceral desire to hit bat for retribution. That's what's happened.

35:08Gordon:The desire for retribution makes a lot of sense. It starts pretty much right after the bombing and really continues at a pretty blistering pace through much of January. It's probably the highest intensity drone action since the predators were introduced back in 2004. And what is going to happen over the next half a year is that everybody who was involved in planning that operation from the Al-Qaeda Taliban side is going to be dead. And, you know, I think the idea that this is a war was pretty roundly emphasized by CI Director Panetta, who just a few days after the bombing basically said, look, when you're at war, there are risks you take, but we're a family and we have to be a family.

36:09Gordon:We now have to pull together to not only deal with the pain of the loss, but also to pull together to make sure that we fulfill the mission. And we hit them hard this past year and they're going to try to hit us back, but we have to stay on the offensive. And that is definitely what happened in the aftermath of Coast. And I think, boy, how do you tie up a story like this? I mean, there is some truth to the idea that, well, okay, this is a war. When you're in a war, the other side has agency and can do things and pushes back. And the reality is that since 9-11, there have been 52 stars, including the seven from Coast, that are added to the CIA's memorial wall at Langley to honor fallen officers.

36:56Gordon:So, you know, the CIA is not a particularly big place. That number doesn't seem big when you think about the number of American soldiers killed in those conflicts, or certainly when you think about just the total mayhem of the sort of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East since 9-11. But inside a really, really small group like the CIA, I mean, 52 people dying in these sort of conflicts since 9-11, 7 and coast in one day. It's a pretty massive toll. And I remember, again, I wasn't working on this at the agency, but I was in in 2009. And psychologically, it was a really hard time at CIA.

37:39Gordon:And, you know, you talk to people who were involved in this even now, right? And not necessarily people who were in COAST, but people who were involved in the case in some way. And they would say it was the absolute worst thing that they ever experienced over the course of their agency career. I mean, one of my friends who was interviewed by the task force that got stood up internally to sort of look at this, who was involved in the case, basically said, you know, like you to the task force, you can't make me feel any worse than I feel now. And I think there was a lot of blame to go around and no one sort of thing to blame for

38:22David:this happening. Yeah. I mean, the scars, I think you're right, the scars run deep and still when you speak to people about it today it still certainly feels quite raw and i do think that it was compounded i think by some of the blame games that you saw afterwards i think there was some kind of unpleasant stuff written particularly about jennifer which i think some of it was a bit sexist some of it was kind of case officers retired case officers off to go well you know that's what happens if you get a little analyst run an important base or station or do this kind of stuff and you know i found that kind of depressing because you know you can pick apart mistakes and i think we have done and we've talked about the mistakes in a kind of sensible way without it turning into that kind of apportioning of blame the way i think some people did afterwards using it maybe for different agendas and i think there are important lessons i mean there are important lessons i think see i'm sure learned those lessons you know about the risks of getting too invested in sources and you know as you put at falling in love with sources about the risks of how you run the security of those cases.

39:27David:I think just about the simple fact that actually these terrorist groups were capable of running kind of complex double, triple agent cases against the CIA, which I think they'd maybe been underestimated of. So I think there were lessons to be learned from it, even if you don't get into the kind of blame side of things.

39:46Gordon:Yeah, it's certainly true that if, and in fact, I actually think one of the lines in the, or kind of a piece of the internal agency review basically was like, look, there was going to be a suicide bombing in the coast that day because you can't not meet with this guy. You're going to meet with him. The potential intelligence value is so great that it's worth the risk of having a meeting. So that's going to happen. Balaoui is going to get in the car with that suicide vest on and he's going to show up at the outskirts of Coast Base. Even if you have grievous doubts about the extent to which the Jordanians have ever controlled this guy, and you go all the way back upstream into this case and say, this guy's a true believer.

40:43Gordon:It's really hard to recruit true believers. He's been outside of your control for the better part of a year. and it's bad, which I think Darren Labonte had kind of said things like that. Even if you think that's true, because he might be able to lead you to Zawahiri, you're still going to take the meeting, which means that he's going to show up outside a coast and it's going to be a sort of high threat meeting. Where do you kind of close something like this out? I think it's, I was having a conversation with one of the guys who was involved in this, and he said that it's still, you know, it's something that just hangs over him, his role in this, and could he have done more, could he have stopped it?

41:37Gordon:And all of this kind of tradecraft, the complexities of running this kind of case for all of the families, this is still something that it's not history, right? This stuff really carries through to the present day. And I think it's true of everyone inside the agency who is involved in this, is that it's still something that people get choked up about and that they carry through with them and always will.

42:07David:Yeah. So I think that's the place to end it. Rest in peace to those who passed in that awful attack, but an important story to tell, I think. And so thank you for joining us on this four-part series on The Rest is Classified. Tough as it was, I think it's also been, as I said, a kind of important story. So thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.

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